Beware, as you value your peace, beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's sake!'-- Here he looked round with agony;--'give me a glass of bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was, and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author satirised.
The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was that called _Catherine_, which is the story taken from the life of a wretched woman called Catherine Hayes.

It is certainly not pleasant reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose.

It assumes to have come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and murderers if their doings and language were described according to their nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and therefore imitation.

Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, Harrison Ainsworth's _Jack Sheppard_, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by the novelists of the day.

"Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue, "Solomon is dull; but don't attack his morality.